publisher tips

Mike Morrison has a 20 minute video describing what a poster session is and how to make a poster. Unlike Mike, however, I do not believe poster sessions are “holding the human race back in a non insignificant way.” The video, particularly the first half, is pessimistic about poster sessions. Around 13:25, good stuff starts to happen as Mike outlines a good poster design. I think he overestimates people’s willingness to snap pictures of QR codes, though. Mike has provided templates here , and is working on a study validating the design he has. He is looking for grad students to participate. You can email him at Mike.A.Morrison@gmail.com . Amy Burgain saw this video and offers this alternative : Amy writes: It achieves the clear simple message BUT emphasizes how that message is supported by the DATA. It keeps the goal of understanding how the conclusion is related to the data while also making it easier to glean main messages. I plan to have my own longer post about this in a couple of...

Today’s contribution comes from Ram Vaidhyanath! Click to enlarge: Radiology’s whol deal is taking pictures, which makes it a very visual field. This poster takes advantage of that, and uses lots of high quality images. Those are excellent. The title is big and extremely visible from a distance. Same with the headings. The bars under the title and heading is a nice visual touch, too. It helps break up the space a little. One possible issue is that the bar under the title is about the same length as the word “Pictorial,” making it look like a botched attempt at underlining the word. The bar might be a little better if it was either lengthened or shortened so that it didn’t “attach” itself to the word above it. The layout is clear in the order of expected reading, but there are a couple of things that are a little frustrating. That the three right columns align the pictures in them precisely makes the single picture in the left hand column stand out, and not in a good way. In a rather ja...

This week’s poster comes from Jeremy Hemberger . I believe that this was presented at last year’s Entomological Society of America meeting. Click to enlarge! Jeremy writes that the graphic design parts were done in Illustrator. All the pieces were then assembled using inDesign. I love the relaxed feel of this poster. One of the things that helps tremendously is that it very consciously and deliberately shows how it is not trying to fill all the available space. The bottom quarter or so of the poster contains a couple of logos (appropriately tucked down in the corner) and some simple, inviting artwork. And even between the two of those, there is a big space in light blue that is comfortable just holding space and doing nothing else. It’s kind of a glorious signal of confidence. More stuff would look desperate. I like how the title is broken down in a a simple, highlighted phrase on the left, and a smaller subtitle over on the right. I haven’t seen author information handled this way b...

Today’s poster comes from contributor Benjamin Wu. Click to enlarge! Ben and I talked about capitalization, particularly in the title. There are three styles: headline / title casing (on left below), sentence casing (right), and all capitals. (The example above is not a good example for a poster, because the title is the same size as the main text. You wouldn’t have on a poster title.) I see examples of all three on posters all the time. I’m not a fan of all capitals, because it looks shouty, like a Hulk or Dalek Twitter account. I lean towards sentence casing, because we read sentences all the time. It makes it easier to recognize proper nouns . But proper nouns (name of person, place, or thing) should always be capitalized in any case! The poster’s layout is clean, with consistent space between boxes both horizontally and vertically.  The left quarter of the poster is mostly taken up with an abstract, and it is killing me. Having any abstract is bad enough, but this one is ...

It has been a decade since I started this blog. It had a slow start, but it has turned into one of the most successful, and rewarding, projects of my career. Thank you. To readers who have shown me that this is helpful, thank you. To those who have recommended the blog to others, thank you. To contributors who have been generous enough to share your posters with me and blog readers, a big thank you.You have made it much easier for this blog to continue by always giving me new things to talk about. I suppose this is as good a time as any to mention that a book about poster design is coming. A book written by me, published by Pelagic Publishing . Before I committed to writing a poster book, I needed to be sure it would provide value above and beyond what the blog already does. I’ve always felt there needs to be a reason for writing a book for academics. I see a lot of books (particularly textbooks) that don’t provide much different than others in the field. I never wanted to write a bo...